"DavidG" wrote in message
...
G'day,

I'm staring at a black screen which says "Error loading Operating System".

I'm wondering what went wrong. No matter which way I turn this error
message comes up. This why I have such low confidence in dealing with
activities like this. It always happens.

I faithfully followed instructions, or so I thought. I installed the
physical HDD. I booted to Vista and activated the new hdd. I created a
primary partition, I named the volume WinXP and assigned the drive letter
X.


Don't bother with drive letters.

Think drives and partitions.

Assigning it a drive letter, you're telling Vista you want this partition on
this drive to be letter X: and it stores the information in the Registry.
This information only applies to this installation of Vista.

Booting up in XP, it will assign drive letters in the order that the drives
are detected, not by what Vista has in it's Registry. If you assign a
partition x on this drive y to Z:. in XP and reboot to Vista the drive
letters will be what you set it to in Vista X: and not what you set it to in
XP, Z:

Same with setup, it will assign drive letters in the order drives/partitions
were detected, which is why there is no X:. X: only exist for Vista,
because you told it this partition on this drive you want to be called X:.


I then rebooted the machine and inserted the XP CD. It booted to setup
and I
moved through the setup. When XP then went to reboot, as it rebooted, up
came the error message.

I have tried going through the process a number of times. One of the
quirky
things I noticed when going through this the first time (installing XP)
was
that when it offered me what drive to load it to, it didn't have X it
offered
me E. I thought that was curious. Anyway, what could I do there is no
option to change it to X.

I'm suspecting that XP has installed it has corrupted the Vista
installation. But it seems the XP install is also corrupt. The only
thing
that works on my computer now is the CD/DVD drive. I have rebooted off it
and I've selected a slow format of the E drive in a hope that may fix
something.

The only way I can communicate with the group is by using my laptop.
Which
is slow and tedious. But at least it works. So I guess I have gone to
prove
that no matter how much instruction you have, it ain't no guarantee.

There you go, any wisdom would be appreciated.
Regards
David G.